Open Letter to Goddess-Centered Pagans; Important Funding Drive; Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Dead Son

HOMELESS HUMANS have become the new exemplars of capitalist reality, particularly in the United States. (I made these portraits with my digital Canon SLR while on unpaid/volunteer assignment last week, then processed the pictures as if I were once again working with my beloved M Leicas and Tri-X at 800 ASA developed in D-76 and printing the results on DuPont Varilure, which had photographic paper's highest silver content and was therefore the best paper in the world but was discontinued in 1973 due to capitalist manipulations that triggered skyrocketing silver prices.) Photographs by Loren Bliss © 2016. Click on images to view them full size.

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PLEASE CONSIDER THE following as an open letter to the pagan community, the first of the essays on the relevance of socialism to paganism and of paganism to socialism I promised on 18 July I would soon write. Please also forgive the delay; the 18th was the last time my circumstances actually allowed me the time and energy essential to prepare anything genuinely contemplative for this space; my neighbors and I here in the geezer ghetto are still plagued by our heartless landlord's innumerable and invariably disruptive intrusions as he renovates his for-profit properties to comply with federal low-interest loan requirements.

As I wrote in that most recent OAN essay, how “do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and... also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?”

“Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.”

But of course I was describing a feeling, emotional reality rather than intellectual reality, right brain rather than left brain, and I as soon as I began applying logic to the question, I initially feared I had stepped into a miasma of contradictions I might never be able to resolve.

Then – as so often occurs in my habitually agnostic/skeptical (if not downright cynical) relationship to all forms of spirituality including my own – synchronicity intervened. As it happens, I am working, again as an unpaid volunteer, on another editorial project which brought me into contact with the mostly unacknowledged truth all philosophies – even our own informal assumptions about life – embody the bias imposed by our socioeconomic class: whether we are part of the 99 Percent or part of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage.  Philosophically speaking, our overlords in the One Percent and its Ruling Class view the world as their rightful “god-given” possession, an exploitable commodity – we the people included – to subjugate as greed, sadistic whim and capitalism's mandatory quest for maximum profit dictate. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent – all of us capitalism's victims – either (further) shackle ourselves by adopting the philosophies dictated by our oppressors or we (somehow) wake up and evolve our own philosophical view.

Socialism is, of course, one of the (self-protective) results of our awakening; Marxism is merely socialism's purest and most disciplined form. Paganism – especially in its Wiccan or Gaian forms – is another such awakening. The functional twinship of socialism and paganism begins with their common purpose: the preservation of our species from extinction by capitalist depredation, either as World War III or environmental apocalypse.

Indeed I would go so far as to argue that while one may be a socialist without being pagan, one cannot be a pagan without also being a socialist.

Capitalism, remember, is a direct derivative of Protestant Christianity (for which see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The ultimate form of Protestantism is the Prosperity Gospel,  which reasserts the divine right of kings in its modern form as the divine right of corporate executives and of the One Percent in general. It defines wealth as an expression of divine blessing and attributes poverty to sin. (Backtracking for a moment, Christianity is one of the three Abrahamic religions. It and the others, Judaism and Islam, define the universe as the asexual creation of a male deity and thereby reduce female reproductive power to virtual irrelevance. From this reduction results the contempt for Nature, the misogynistic hatred, the clitoris envy and the implicitly violent insistence on hierarchy that define all patriarchal belief systems.) Predictably, the associated malignancy is intensified to its most extreme, ecocidal and genocidal form in capitalism, which is Abrahamic religion's ultimate distillate. (The historical dynamics of patriarchal religion's distillation into an ever-more-murderous philosophy of exploitation is eloquently documented in The Great Cosmic Mother, Barbara Mor's invaluable work in post-Abrahamic, post-capitalist anthropology, a book that should be twinned with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in terms of significant revelations of our methodically suppressed past.) A basic pagan library should include a well-read copy of each volume.

Remember too the relationship between capitalism and its Abrahamic-religion father is symbiotic: one reinforces the other – hence Marx's condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Hence too the liberation of scientific inquiry resulting from the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion – specifically the widespread Soviet investigation of subjects damned as “Satanic”  in the Christian-dominated U.S. Moreover the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion encouraged not only the U.S.S.R.'s indigenous tribal religions but the resurrection of European paganism by Soviet and post-Soviet youth.

Given that the official, dominant and often violently sustained philosophy of our pre-revolutionary, pre-apocalyptic era is capitalism cum Christianity (or vice-versa), what then are socialism and paganism but efforts by ourselves, the 99 Percent, to liberate ourselves from enslavement by capitalism and Christianity? (I presume I need not add our enslavement is indisputably proven by how capitalism – its depredations countenanced if not encouraged by the Prosperity Gospel -- has already reduced half the U.S. population  to low-income destitution  during the past 43 years. As to how this has come about, see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008].)

Just as socialism is our instrument of economic revolution, so then is paganism our instrument of spiritual revolution – though the class-based nature of modern paganism (another expression of the socialist/pagan twinhood) – has yet to be commonly recognized by either group.

While the revolutionary origins and history of socialism are thoroughly documented,  the modern history of paganism (or neo-paganism as it is sometimes called), is virtually unknown – even to many present-day pagans. Though such a history is beyond the scope of this essay, it can nevertheless be summarized in three sentences. The modern pagan renaissance – and in particular the resurrection of the Great Goddess as its primary deity – began with the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, Robert Graves' definitively revolutionary “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1966). Its initial collective expression occurred within the Beat Movement of the 1950s. (See for example Diane DiPrima's epic Loba (Penguin Books, London: 1973-1998), which, probably more than any other associated work, exemplifies the spiritual revolution implicit in the Beat ethos.) The resurrection process was accelerated by the the Folk Renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which popularized traditional British and European balladry, much of it the disguised yet still-psychically potent remnants of pagan liturgy, a connection explored in detail by the late Holger Olaf Nygard, Duke University's resident folklore scholar. (Alas, Nygard's cutting-edge work, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Duke University Press: 1963], is long out of print – and my copy, probably one of the last in existence, was destroyed by the 1983 fire.) In any case, the point here is that paganism acquired its present global momentum  as an extension of the Counterculture of Rebellion that reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s – an expression of the same save-the-world-from-capitalist-depredation instinct that birthed the Gaia Hypothesis,  Second Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. And I think it no coincidence paganism is, with feminism and environmentalism, among the only Countercultural remnants surviving today.

But from the socialist perspective is spirituality  – any spirituality – not inevitably yet another “opiate of the masses”? And thus, again from the socialist perspective, should not all spirituality therefore be discarded as expeditiously as possible?

Firstly, history shows spirituality is a characteristic human activity impossible to suppress. It is ultimately an expression of our species' quest for individual and collective meaning, as instinctive as other forms of creative expression, as definitively human as sexuality, though – alas (precisely as Abrahamic religion demonstrates) – equally subject to perversion. Secondly the emergence of Liberation Theology,  a radical variant of Catholicism that presents Jesus as a martyred revolutionary and attempts to sidestep Christianity's inherent Abrahamic misogyny, contempt for Nature and hierarchical despotism, proves even a classic, trickle-down opiate might be made to (deceptively) serve the cause of socialist revolution. Thirdly, while Liberation Theology was ultimately an effort by the Ruling Class (as personified by the church) to retain Ruling Class religious dominance (i.e. philosophical supremacy) in an era of rising revolutionary anger, paganism by contrast is an instinctively revolutionary response by those of us increasingly alienated by the roles of organized religion and capitalist governance in spawning, fostering and intensifying capitalism's threat to human survival.

As if to further confirm paganism's revolutionary nature, there is compelling evidence the One Percent and its Ruling Class consider the resurrection of paganism (and particularly its Great Goddess) to be at least as subversive as socialism. (This evidence includes several premature deaths and the mysterious fire that destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my meticulously researched collection of the evidence that would have redefined the Counterculture as the first wave of a revolution against patriarchy.) Paganism's danger to the One Percent and its Ruling Class thus lies in its accelerating rebuttal of Abrahamic despotism, which remember is the root of capitalism. The contrast between the Abrahamic god and the modern pagan goddess is literally a clash of diametrical opposites. Whether one accepts the Abrahamic god as real or symbolic, he is in fact the personification of oppression – the limitation, destruction and/or perversion of our quintessential humanity. Just as, whether one accepts the goddess as real or symbolic, she is the personification of nurturing – the recognition, encouragement and fulfillment of our individual and collective potential.

In this context paganism offers genuine liberation – not just from the Abrahamic religions' patriarchy-sustaining misogynistic anti-sex, anti-sensual and anti-Nature taboos, but from the innate Abrahamic hostility to science as well. While the Abrahamic myth of creation by a male deity is a genuinely unnatural act, contradicting physics, astronomy and biology, the Gaia Hypothesis restates in scientific terms paganism's core principle – that our planet (and by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. Moreover, paganism – unlike so-called Liberation Theology – is not dictated from above; the Ruling Class, which sneeringly denounces paganism as childish superstition or damns it as “Devil worship,” wants nothing to do with it and suppresses it at every opportunity.  Modern paganism is thus born entirely of rebellious intent – a 99 Percent philosophy intended, as I wrote in a long-lost essay, “to fault the (patriarchal) bedrock of (what passes for) civilization” and thereby free us from the psychological component of patriarchal/Abrahamic/capitalist shackles.

Thus too modern paganism is the spiritual and emotional counterpart of what socialism is for economics and politics. If one is truly a dialectical materialist – that is, genuinely committed to understanding “the real conditions of materialist existence” (which include the material of human consciousness) – one must recognize that sociological and psychological realities are equal to economic and political realities in the symbiosis that shapes our circumstances. Moreover, if one is genuinely committed to the pagan ethos of rescuing our human selfhood from beneath the jackboots of patriarchal religion and capitalism  – thereby reconnecting ourselves with Nature and (perhaps) saving ourselves from extinction – the socialist ethos of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is the only way to expand the pagan principle of “as above, so below” to encompass all human society.

Here ends my open letter, which I hope will achieve the widest possible circulation within the pagan community.

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DONATIONS FOR WARBRIDES of Japan, a documentary, are desperately needed and are 100 percent tax deductible. While I do not normally use OAN for fund-raising, this is an especially worthy cause, as detailed in an e-mail Director Yayoi Winfrey recently sent me:

“Our production team has scheduled interviews with 11 Japanese war brides and/or their adult children in eight cities and three states. However, donations to our crowdfunding campaign, which began two weeks ago, has slowed down considerably, leaving us short on production funds. We desperately need your tax-deductible dollars for two airline tickets, car rental and gas plus hotel accommodations and meals for two weeks while we shoot. Won't you please help us get this documentary onto the screen? we would appreciate your participation no matter what size your donation.  Again, every dollar is tax-deductible if you donate at this site.  And please don't hesitate to ask questions you might have about where your donation dollars will go.”

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I HAVE COME to regard it as a kind of cheating to re-post comments I wrote on threads at other websites, but the following is the first time I have ever been able to bring myself to write publicly of the tragedy that – because it occurred during our society's pre-feminist refusal to acknowledge reproductive trauma – shattered the marriage shared by my second wife and me.

The writing was itself a surprise, my entirely unpremeditated response to an emotionally wrenching report  detailing the birth of a dead child and the creditor-intensified emotional devastation it inflicted on both parents.

What follows is slightly expanded from the original, which was condensed to fit Reader Supported News' 1500-character space restriction:

Albeit without the crushing debt that afflicted the author of the RSN essay after the death of her daughter, my second wife and I were similarly wounded by the death of our son. Hence we share Ms. Blossom's sorrow.

Ironically, we lived in Manhattan, the psychiatric capitol of the world, but it was 1967, and the feminist movement had yet to raise USian emotional consciousness enough for the shrinks to recognize the trauma associated with a still-born child.

We had made our baby deliberately and knowingly, gazing into one another's eyes amidst the exquisite pleasure and infinite joy of love, and like the Blossoms, we were anticipating, with all the characteristic happiness and apprehension, our transformation from a couple into a family. Adrienne, in that singularly female bio-emotional way of knowing  – a mode of perception we men can never truly comprehend  – had decided as a child age seven or eight she wanted a son named Loren, and now she was collecting the requisite baby clothes and related items ancillary to the fulfillment of her desire and intention. I on my part had already decided to give up the uncertain life of an editorial freelancer, take a staff job on one of the many New Jersey dailies that surrounded the City and thus aim for an eventual slot on one of the Manhattan papers, most likely The New York Post, which then before Rupert Murdoch bought it and destroyed it was the most proudly Left-leaning daily in the United States.

But at the end of our sixth month of pregnancy a moral imbecile for whom there are not vile enough pejoratives in any language ran for a train, and in his vicious haste – cursed may he be – he knocked Adrienne down the long flight of iron stairs to the lower level of the Union Square subway station. It was a Sunday; she had gone to visit friends on the Upper East Side, returned home that evening massively bruised and limping from the fall, and three days later our son was born dead.

My wife saw him briefly in the emergency room, an experience she cannot talk about even now, 49 years later. I viewed him for a moment as a nurse carried him in a glass jar through the Beth Israel Hospital emergency waiting room.

“Is that the Bliss baby,” I asked.

“Who are you,” she asked in reply.

“I'm the father,” I said. “May I see?”

Except for his purple color, he seemed perfectly formed, almost a twin of the infant I knew from pictures of myself as a babe-in-arms, his hair as near-black as my own was then.

I cannot yet describe my feelings as the nurse bore him away; even now no words suffice.

In keeping with that era's accepted practice, we stifled our grief. A year later it seemed we despised one another, and by 1974 we were divorced – though now in the final years of our lives we are again emotionally close though we live on opposite coasts.

Thanks to feminist consciousness-raising, trauma such as ours and the Blossoms is at last acknowledged, even unto the fact it is a wound from which full healing is rarely if ever achieved. But its hurt can indeed be ameliorated by therapy – save when capitalist greed prices such relief out of our reach, an atrocity the only cure for which is the abolition of capitalism – another of the many reasons my politics are what they are.

Meanwhile, if reincarnation is real, may that which animated our son live again as someone else's child – and this time thrive.

And yes, we would have named him Loren.

LB/8 August 2016.

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Grabshot of Girl Relishing Cake Foretells Good News

Photographed this young girl while I was on assignment in Tacoma's Wright Park a couple hours before doctors at Group Health Cooperative told me my congestive heart failure is stable and that if it remains so, I should live as long as genetics and Fate would otherwise have allowed. (Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 2016.) 

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MY APOLOGY FOR the unprecedentedly long silence, OAN's longest hiatus since I began its publication in 2009 and – or so I surely hope – a silence never to be repeated.

While the above cutline summarizes the good news, the details are (1) – that while the echo cardiogram my previous post said was forthcoming does indeed confirm I have congestive heart failure, it also indicates the condition is of a magnitude controllable by medication, exercise and weight loss; (2) – that despite an excruciatingly painful right knee (the bone-running-on-bone result of my 1978 radical meniscectomy  now severely inflamed by osteoarthritis), I am again managing to walk a mile almost every day; and (3) – that with my no-more-than-two-slices-of-bread-per-day diet, which I resumed once the devastation of temporary eviction was behind me, I am again losing weight, so much so I am now comfortably wearing belts with which I had not been able to cinch up my trousers since 2007.

The dark side of weight loss – the dark backside of poverty potentially brightened by a sudden full-moon at emotional midnight – is if I keep losing weight, I will eventually have to buy a new wardrobe, which is unaffordable thanks to the $155 per month Dem/GOP capitalist governance has slashed from my 2016 income. Thus like all of us impoverished folk I am being victimized to Baby Jesus nakedness by the weaponized poverty of Prosperity-Gospel Christianity, Thus too the reference to the full moon: an entirely do-able gesture of bare-assed defiance by anyone reduced to nudity by poverty.

Which, if we reflect on it, elevates nude dancing from its capitalist-proclaimed immorality to the very most moral, ¡no pasaran! form of revolutionary defiance – about which more in a moment.

Meanwhile I have – thanks to a beloved friend who is a genuine Witch, and to her patronesse and Muse who was not just a true Witch but a Laughing Witch brimming with love and humor 500 years ago in what is now Peru, I have a new mantra:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose a path of healing and creativity.

I never before believed that sort of recitation of aspirations unto one's self was anything more than a human-potentialist variant of mental masturbation, but now I have discovered it does indeed work, and at long last, no doubt due to its self-hypnosis, I seem to be doing just what the cliche says, “putting behind me” the devastating trauma of my childhood and its vast intensification by the 1983 fire.

Thus it is easy to imagine my Witch ancestors Margaret Blisse and Mary Blisse, comely and successful mother and daughter farmers who were tried for witchcraft in 17th Century Connecticut and beat the rap, are laughing and applauding from their resting places in the Summerlands, unless of course they've been reborn in new bodies. (That they triumphed over envy and malice means they most likely were real Witches, knowledgeable in the clandestinely preserved skill to enchant with Truth, much as the legendary Jack Orion possessed similar skill  but as a man – such arts are remnants of the ancient matriarchies – could not do it with presence alone and thus required the aid of an instrument, originally a harp but by the 1600s a fiddle.

Meanwhile my mantra, which keeps changing as I change, has become an eerily appropriate accompaniment to a conversation I had with a young friend and comrade while walking in the park this very morning. She mentioned an Allen Ginsberg poem, Kaddish  (italicized rather than enclosed by quotation marks because it is an epic published as a separate book), and our conversation, which was about her own growth process, was also significant enough to my own psychological and political growth I looked up the Ginsberg work when I returned to my (now almost fully reconstructed ) home. (Yes, I met him several times in the City, and yes, I have all his published material.) There near the beginning of Kaddish, which I had not read in many years, I found a line that surely applies to all of us who are working to save our species from capitalism and its otherwise-inevitable extermination of our species and destruction of our planet, whether it does so by World War III or environmental ruin or some combination of both:

“...Dreaming back through life, Your time -- and mine accelerating
                                                        toward Apocalypse...”

Ginsberg's text thus prompted a response with my own words, first my oft-repeated statement that “in such times as these, when the One Percent has weaponized poverty and is using it in place of Zyklon B for our own genocidal removal, survival is a form of revolutionary defiance,” and then this I wrote on a Reader Supported News comment thread two days ago (for which scroll down):

Let us ask ourselves: why would the One Percenters want to ensure World War III?

Because -- precisely as their now-obviously permanent obstruction of effective climate-change amelioration proves beyond a scintilla of doubt -- they believe our species and our planet are already doomed.

Never mind it is obvious socialism could yet save us -- that it is in fact the only economic system capable of doing so.

It is equally obvious the One Percenters themselves -- who are most assuredly not stupid -- recognize socialism as our species' only possible mechanism of survival.

But fanatical capitalists (and therefore moral imbeciles) that they are, they are also suicidally committed to the doctrine of "better dead than Red."

They fear -- quite reasonably -- that after a socialist revolution, they would be the very first criminals to be arrested, tried and probably executed for their innumerable crimes against humanity.

Hence, like doomed serial killers making a suicidal last stand against certain arrest and execution, they want to ensure all the rest of us die with them.

Indeed, per Occam's Razor, this hypothesis explains all the situation's knowns and unknowns, hence is the only rational explanation for the USian Empire's terrifying renewal of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Which brings me back to my new mantra, revised yet again and now useful for anyone of any age or race or gender who is transcending subjugation:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose the path of Revolution, within and without.

Hence the greater significance of the little girl smiling her cake-smeared joy at my camera: may my comrades and I ensure by our solidarity her daughter and her granddaughter and all the daughters and sons to follow will know such small but seismic pleasures.

But how then do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and the apparent contradiction of also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?

Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.

Stay tuned.

LB/17 July 2016

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Six Essays: Gratitude for the Restoration of My Eyesight, Pagan Music as an Antidote to the Politics of Despair

 

Emergence Nr. 17 (Click on image to view it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1971, 1976, 1985, 2016.

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THOSE WHO WERE appalled by my impending blindness will be delighted to learn an eleventh-hour charity paid Group Health Cooperative the obscenely prohibitive co-payments it charges for the surgery required to save my eyesight. (Group Health's fees, in no way exceptional, exemplify what obtains when health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right, and the care-giving organization's primary purpose is therefore to put oodles of boodle in executive pockets rather than treat the sick and heal the wounded.) That said, if there are any of you I have failed to thank for your supportive and/or prayerful good thoughts, please accept this expression of my gratitude as well as my apology for the oversight.

But I would be derelict in my journalistic duty were I to ignore this opportunity to note the likelihood there are also amongst OAN's readers a few who were cheering my blindness and praying it would silence me forever. Since Occupy Tacoma, http://occupytacoma.org/71-year-old-tacoma-veteran-on-why-she-got-involved-with-the-occupy-movement/ interference by the secret police will not allow me to email OAN's Internet address to anyone unless I first disguise it as a TinyURL. And let us not forget my 2010 ouster from Facebook in retaliation for suggesting the so-called “Great Recession” was deliberately engineered to usher in accelerated austerity and thereby speed the imposition of overt fascism.

Thus, in addition to thanking my benefactors, I give my most emphatic middle-finger salute to the vassals and functionaries of the One Percent – the spooks and police agents and soldiers and politicians and bureaucrats and cops and maybe even a welfare official or two – all of them fanatical defenders of capitalism and sworn enemies of the Working Class, each of them a-boil with Heinrich Himmler hatefulness perpetually inflamed by Christofascist or JesuNazi cults whose Yeshua is “der Führer Who Art in Heaven” and whose sadistic intent toward the 99 Percent is to brutalize us into slave-camp submission no matter our race or gender or how we define ourselves politically or spiritually or sexually – and then, when we are too old or crippled or mentally mangled to be exploitable for profit, to cast us off like worn-out machinery and exterminate us by “austerity” and whatever other methodologies of genocide can be hidden beneath cloaks of euphemisms, disinformation and Big Lies. Let us also in this naming of enemies note all those 99 Percenters who yet stupidly believe capitalism will someday let them “hit it big” – that is, to get so rich they can brazenly fuck over everybody else – and now either sit at home opiated by Mainstream Media and awaiting the Rapture or have already joined Moron Nation's roving bands of misogynists and homophobes, banging their Bibles and brandishing their biblical bellicosity to terrify women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual folk and anyone else who might dare rediscover the holiness of sensuality and everything else stolen from us by patriarchy in the name of “God's divine plan for salvation.”

To all such adversaries I turn the other cheek – that is, the other cheek of my arse, that they may glimpse the defiance implicit in a Full Moon.

Plus in my case there were probably also less fingerworthy, less cheekworthy detractors, a very few hateful kinfolk breathing sighs of malicious relief at the apparent end to my periodic disclosures of familial dysfunction. There's even a faint possibility the personal-adversary list includes the first woman I truly loved, she who at age 17 captured my heart by teaching me Plato's Republic. Though our relationship lasted three years, in her eyes I was never more than a stepladder for escaping the slums. Despite her sociological origins, she was boldly articulate and beautiful and memorably shameless in bed, but she thought my talents inferior and regarded journalism as an insufficiently glorious choice in comparison to the worlds of literature, fine art and academia. As soon as I was bailed out of jail, she demanded to know if I was “getting involved with Communists and stuff.” I answered truthfully – “probably,” I said – and without a moment's hesitation she replied, “then I'm leaving.”

This last event was long long ago and far far away on geography I have not visited since 1969 and will probably never trod again, but I remember it whenever I review my life as I am doing now in rescued-from-blindness introspection, and I am always surprised to discover her rejection still hurts, no doubt because she was my first lover in this lifetime whose intellect I truly respected, and she was therefore too the first woman whose claim to see me as attractive seemed believable and even trustworthy, never mind the all-pervasive sense of physical and psychological ugliness that is an irremediable part of my psyche. The long-ago blow of her rejection was thus many times multiplied by how it brought back to dagger-sharp focus my own negative sense of self. Such is the oddly enduring nature of love-related trauma, lingering even when the love is subsequently proven to have been wholly unrequited and the illusion of its sharedness thus discredited as nothing more than manipulation bolstered by one's own penchant for fantasy and wishful thinking. How happy I am to have escaped that relationship's ultimate ensnarement. How quickly introspection see-saws me from joy to sadness and back again, mixed reflections viewed – even with restored vision – behind mutually contradictory tears.

(Forgive me if I bathe in bathos or lapse into lugubriousness [the latter noun, by its congested-sinus resonance, perhaps my favorite example of onomatopoeia]. Or don't forgive me. As long as you keep on reading, I really don't care.) 

*** *** ***

THE MOST IMPORTANT point to take away from my brush with blindness is how the obscenity of defining health care as a privilege of wealth combines with the capitalist greed of chief executive officers to eliminate all meaningful distinction between non-profit and for-profit care-providers. That is the real significance of the prohibitive price – nearly $161 per minute for approximately five out-patient minutes of laser surgery – that without the intervention of charity would have damned me to permanent sightlessness.

But it is also important to note how the ability to pay that fee (or any comparable sum) has been put forever beyond my own financial reach by the senior-subsidy cuts imposed by Washington state Democrats.  Charity saved my eyesight (and thus saved me) this time, but what happens if there is another pay-or-die medical crisis? The truth is that I, like so many others, am now imprisoned in a de facto death-cell, locked behind invisible bars and restrained by invisible chains until the Reaper – himself obviously a Ruling Class functionary – calls my name.

These circumstances exemplify the murderous economics of capitalism and of the now unabashedly capitalist (and therefore overtly fascist) economics of the USian Imperial Homeland and afflict untold numbers of us whether old or young also exemplify the diabolical cunning of capitalist governance. We satisfy the partial-truth needs of the imperial propagandists because we (officially) have health insurance. But we also slake the infinite greed of the insurance barons who fatten their assets collecting premiums for insurance deliberately structured to be unusable. Here, of course, is the genocidal purpose behind prohibitively priced co-pays. If we purchase the care that might save our lives, we are left with insufficient money for food or shelter. Ultimately our only choice is how we will die: will it be from untreated illness, or from malnutrition and homelessness or some combination of all three. Or perhaps we will yield to ultimate despair and do an Ernest Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath or a Diane Arbus or exit via some other premature means. Such are the methods by which the capitalists exterminate those of us deemed “surplus workers” – those of us considered no longer exploitable for profit.

*** *** ***

IRONICALLY IT IS the Bible, the world's most viciously patriarchal (and therefore definitively capitalist) doctrinal sourcebook, that contains what is probably the most anti-capitalist proverb ever penned: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15-10, King James Bible).

Thus we witness the toxic fulsomeness of capitalism in all its genocidal savagery and ecocidal malignance. We see how capitalism transforms the (literally) deadly sin of infinite greed and elevates it to the capitalists' ultimate virtue – the one ethos most vital for capitalist function. We recognize how capitalism thereby rejects every humanitarian principle our species has ever evolved. We acknowledge how it replaces all these age-old principles with its might-makes-right (and-mighty-profit-makes-mighty-right) credo of serial-killer moral imbecility.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

And now at last perhaps we are being forced to admit capitalism threatens the survival of not just our own species but literally of all life as we know it. Which makes capitalism the closest real-world approximation of the Abrahamic concept of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

Yet far too many of us remain suicidally blind to what capitalism is doing to us all and how its own depredations point to socialism as our species' only possible means of survival.

Susan Sontag wrote of illness as metaphor, and though I have always understood the notion intellectually, I did not comprehend it emotionally until I understood how the blitzkrieg of looming blindness and my own financial defenselessness was a perfect metaphor for the plight of the entire 99 Percent. Capitalism has smashed all our mechanisms of resistance and now, as if to use us for compost in its next crop of atrocities, it is plowing us all under.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

As for me, I probably would have been white-cane sightless by the end of next month, just in time for my 76th birthday. Between 3 January, when I first noticed my sight diminishing into milky haze, and 27 January, the date of the surgery, I had already gone nearly blind in my right eye, and the sight in my left eye was in jeopardy. But the laser surgery not only restored my distance vision, returning it to the Fountain-of-Youth clarity achieved by the original cataract surgery;  it also improved my close-up vision, minimizing my need for reading glasses – an affect my ophthalmologist says is commonplace but unpredictable and is therefore not mentioned to patients beforehand lest they by disappointed should it not materialize.
But what of all the other women, children and men who are not so fortunate as I have been? Reflect not just on the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people;  think also of the original Bloody Sunday and Triangle Shirtwaist and Bhopal and Katrina and Bangladesh.  How many more must die before the ravages of the capitalists are ended?

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

*** *** ***

WHY HAD MY vision been saved? What was Fate demanding of me? I had never been granted a favor of such magnitude, nothing even remotely so pivotal, and my dialectical-materialist skepticism was instantly at war with my Pagan intuition. The former dismisses my good fortune as random chance; the latter defines it as a genuine miracle, an event that requires some new vow of gratitude (“thank you Goddess; hence I shall devote the rest of my life to [whatever cause]”), this combined with some ritual of thanksgiving, by rainy-season necessity a private indoor rite though at least accompanied by incense and suitable music, the search for which brought a Muse-poet named S.J.Tucker into this text – she who  dares respond to the challenge Tim Buckley voiced 49 years ago: “if you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” But that – articulating the pain of her gender and her generation – is only part of her repertoire; she also she grants blessings aplenty of comic relief, and not infrequently the purity of healing laughter as well. Her website tells me S. J. stands for Susan Jane, that her friends call her “Sooj” – and I find myself hoping she might read this and at least recognize me as a distant ally, a elder comrade, though I cannot imagine we would ever meet.

But first before I continue praising Tucker as a True Bard – surely as true as any since the first Taliesin (he who sang mysteriously of “the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets” perhaps 2400 years before Trafalgar) – there is the matter of that other vision I mentioned in this essay's title: a dark vision, my own troubled vision of our present potential and our probable future (scroll down the comment thread for my two contributions), a haunting mind's-eye vision that in my film-camera past and as shown in the image above, sometimes took form, invariably with a faint warning prelude of alchemical sibilance, on DuPont Varilure in 1:3 Dektol beneath amber-filtered lights, and sometimes too as passages of spontaneous prose seemingly borne of some outside source (“where the fuck did this come from; I can't believe I wrote it”), as if the Muse (whose objective reality my dialectic materialist agnosticism forever forces me to question), were nevertheless once again whispering her double reassurance – that she forgives me even my gravest doubts and that – as Robert Graves put it – she offers “nothing promised that is not performed.”

As I confessed in today's title, I vacillate between faint hope for our species' post-apocalyptic survival and absolute despair at the runaway nuclear train of our self-inflicted extinction. The former is ephemeral at best; the latter, which too often seems impossible to refute, is authenticated by my too-intimate knowledge of the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich, which is (A), hell-bent on conquering the world; (B), ever-more-relentlessly subjugating all its peoples beneath the profiteering tyranny of the Imperial One Percent, whilst (C), being endlessly cheered on by Moron Nation mobs chanting “USA! USA! USA!” at every war crime or homeland atrocity.
Trouble is, most USians – all of our brains at least partially clogged with capitalist propaganda – are carefully conditioned to never dare look at ourselves in any sort of psychologically revealing mirror. Thus we are loathe to acknowledge Moron Nation's Zieg Heil reality is but few footfalls distant from that of Nazi Germany. And we are genuinely terrified to admit we are the most ignorant people in the industrial world – that we reside in the only realm on this planet to embrace Orwell's satiric “Ignorance Is Strength” as biblical writ – and that we have done so with such prideful malevolence it has become the one inviolable shibboleth of our national (un)consciousness.  As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin asked in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Then as now, and precisely as Lenin stated, “'(f)reedom' is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labor, the working people were robbed.” But what is so radically different – and what reduces the ideological quarrels of Lenin's era to apparent meaninglessness – is the unprecedented extent to which the Working Class of today, the 99 Percent, has been robbed not only of the tools of resistance and the knowledge of how to use them, but all too often also gutted of the sense of selfhood and grievance from which effective resistance arises. In Vladimir Ilyich's time, whether in the imperial United States or the Russian Empire, the instruments of oppression were obvious: the bullets and bayonets of the soldiers, the knouts and truncheons of the Cossacks and the cops, the prison and the gallows, the lynchings and pogroms tolerated by (and often encouraged by) the authorities. The means of resistance were therefore also obvious. Now, despite our rising anger at what the capitalists are doing to us, it is for the most part suppressed by modern variants of pānem et circēnsēs, the bread-and-circus opiates by which the Roman Empire controlled its own oppressed masses. The USian forms of these distractions are many. They include the Colosseum-equivalents of violent films and professional sports; the pornographic antics of celebrities; other forms of vacuous entertainment including what passes for “news”; the zomboid numbing induced by alcohol and drugs whether legal or otherwise; and most of all the omnipresent opiate of Abrahamic fundamentalism, its socioeconomically malicious prosperity gospel having now become so malignantly popular its taint is found even in avowedly secular New Age and Pagan conceptualizations. (Yet what else could be expected here in the most moronically Christian-fundamentalist nation in the industrial world?) Hence what a fellow Occupy activist said to me in 2011: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.” What she dared not add was the probability most of us are broken beyond repair.

What then – if anything – can be done?

In Lenin's day it was customary for revolutionary parties to offer political-education programs – and by all the available evidence, the global Working Class was eager – literally trudge-barefoot-through-the-blizzard eager –  to receive it. But in the USian homeland of today – where the prison-like atmosphere of government schools guarantees the educational process is disliked (if not despised outright) even by those of us who theoretically know better – the mere thought of returning to a classroom or even picking up a book or pamphlet is often prohibitively repugnant. This sort of aversive conditioning – part of a far greater scheme of making certain our every contact with government is unpleasant if not disastrous – is perhaps the most cunning way capitalism defends itself against socialism. Socialism is after all a form of government – the most democratic form our species has yet evolved – and as government it requires organization and personnel. But if government itself is despised, its form becomes irrelevant – and that is precisely the adverse legacy fostered by the inherent malevolence of capitalist governance. The same methodology is even more evident in the state and federal welfare bureaucracies, their obvious purpose not to help us weather the chronic instability of capitalism but rather to deny us the very aid we need for survival – thereby ensuring we are reduced to perpetual victimhood. This not only serves the capitalists by providing a vast supply of unemployed workers whose desperation for work shrinks wages to hitherto-unimaginable minimums; it also intensifies the hatred and suspicion that fuels anti-government sentiment ranging from the Anarchists to the Tea Party.  It is thus the key to understanding how so many Working Class folk are seduced into the economic suicide of supporting Right Wing candidates and parties: their anger and sense of betrayal by (capitalist) government leaves them no apparent alternative. In this context, education thus acquires a triple cloak of repugnance, firstly because of its prison pedagogy, secondly as a microcosm of capitalist governance, lastly as the traditional target of the venomous anti-intellectualism that has always been the prime effluent of Abrahamic fundamentalism.  Here is the root cause of why modern efforts to educate the USian Working Class invariably fail. Here too is the ultimate source of my own political despair, for it is one of the absolute truths of history that without education, revolution is not just impossible, it is also unthinkable.

But there remains one medium of communication (and therefore of education) that transcends all the negative associations the USian Ruling Class has maliciously affixed to education. This is music which – since its stimuli is as sensual as it is intellectual – is perfect for the dissemination of revolutionary or heretical ideas. Indeed it has already served as literatures of rebellion for populations as far removed from one another in time and geography as medieval peasants, antebellum slaves, modern USian minorities and indigenous peoples of the post-colonial Third World. Hence the relevance of the work by S.J. Tucker and her colleagues transcends its personal significance to me and becomes political in the broadest possible sense.

*** *** ***

A FEW DAYS after the surgery that saved my sight I was researching more of Faun's inspiring output and thinking what a tragedy it was my late friend and spiritual sister Helen Farias had not lived long enough to witness this example of the joyously revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual flowering that is taking place within – and in open defiance of – the electronic concentration camp the USian Empire is making of our entire planet.

Helen was the first person to read and comment on the earliest (1971) draft of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” and it was Helen who paid the work what is probably the most significant compliment I will ever receive as a writer – “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the words to express.” Eighteen years later she founded the women's spirituality journal Beltane Papers, worked herself to exhaustion advancing the scholarship that was legitimizing the resurrection of the Goddess and died of cancer on the autumnal equinox of 1994. By then, not only had “Dancer” been destroyed by fire, but the loss – 24 years of research notes, photography and text financed by my paychecks from print journalism and therefore accomplished mostly on weekends and during occasional periods of freelancing – had flung me into a clinical depression of such depth and duration it forced me onto welfare which, as all but the newest OAN readers know, branded me with the forever-inescapable odium of having been officially disabled. My formerly award-winning reportorial, photographic and editorial skills were thus rendered effectively worthless by the characteristic USian hatefulness toward anyone who is known to have been afflicted by mental illness. Even when such a condition is definitively temporary, as mine surely was – even though I was never institutionalized – such a diagnosis once officially rendered interacts with Moron Nation bigotry to produce more than enough venom to destroy one's career prospects forever. But despite the associated depths of despair I have never been able to abandon “Dancer's” core hypothesis: that no matter whether the Goddess is symbol or objective reality, it is only through her resurrection we will evolve – or perhaps restore – the sort of consciousness from which we can articulate and organize the politics we need to save our species from extinction. I was thinking about these matters, surfing the Internet and wishing I were necromancer enough to call back Helen to revel in the triumphant implications of Faun and the wild acclaim of its ever-growing audiences when the magic carpet of YouTube somehow bore me into S.J. Tucker's “realm of the sky.”  The accompanying video, one of the most evocatively powerful such pieces I have seen, is itself well worth watching. 

Though I am nearly 76 years old, my journalistic curiosity remains as intense as it was in my youth, and whenever I find myself happenstanced onto new ground, I am thus compelled to explore it. I was vaguely familiar with “Witches Rune,”  one of Tucker's earlier works, a verse from which I quoted to open Part 5 of “Dancer Resurrected,” an OAN essay  that is entirely too long and desperately needful of competent editing but after revision is sure to be a central part of a book I have tentatively titled “Encounters: a Modern Odyssey.” But I when I was researching and writing “Resurrected,” I was working with my usual intensity of focus and neglected to pursue Tucker's repertoire any further – obviously my loss, and an error for which I hereby apologize should she ever read these words. Now though I paid attention and explored her work and was soon rewarded with her variant of “Tam Lin,” a traditional ballad most likely borne of a remnant of what long long long ago in the age of the Goddess had been a lay of invocatory magick. It is a song for Hallowe'en, which in Celtic Paganism is the night the year dies, but the pre-patriarchal ancientness of its origins is suggested by its portrayal of the spirit of the year as female rather than male. Hence the lyrics seem to embody two liturgical purposes, first to mark the annual departure of the goddess of the Old Year, who in response to more recent expressions of Christian love [i.e. witch-burnings] has been disguised as the Queen of Faery; next to welcome the goddess of the New Year disguised as the shameless Janet pregnant by her chosen consort the Once and Future King, her pregnancy the metaphor for a rich harvest the following spring and summer. The earlier variants of “Tam Lin,” all of them collected during the past three centuries, each hinted at the underlying sexual connections, but Tucker's reconstruction implicitly recognizes the sacramental elements that define pagan sexuality. These she spells out in poetic detail (how else might Janet have gotten her “dirty knees”?), which elevates Tucker's “Tam Lin” to the most ritualistically appropriate variant I have yet encountered. It is also – very appropriately, I think – notably reminiscent of what traditional British balladry sounded like after a century in Appalachia (the archetypal example of which is the transformation of “burgundy wine” to “burglar's wine” in the murder-ballad “Willow Garden”). Tucker's revisions make me wonder – and yearn to find out – what she might do with two other surviving lays of sexual magick, “Jack Orion”  and “Willie's Lady,”  a more traditionally Scots variant of which is here. 

But for me the most intriguing element of Tucker's music is her merger of myth and mirth with the politics of resistance, a bonding exemplified by “Baba Yaga,” which repeats in story-form the humanitarian message the patriarchal lore-thieves stole from the Goddess many millennia ago: “as you do unto the also least of these, you likewise do unto me.” It also suggests song as the medium by which pagan steadfastness might yet, to the ultimate benefit of us all, be comfortably mated with Marxist/Leninist/Maoist determination. Which conjures up an image of a Peoples Court, the Red Banner adorning the wall behind the bench, the three judges briefly conferencing in whispers, then the senior judge ordering the defendant to stand for sentencing. “It is the finding of this court,” she says, “that you as a capitalist are guilty of innumerable crimes against the People. Accordingly, you are turned over to Baba Yaga, that she may eat you for her lunch.” Which recalls a graffito that began appearing on Pacific Northwest walls maybe 30 years ago: “Eat the Rich,” though nowhere did I see a corollary “Baba Yaga Lives.”

*** *** ***

WHEN WE EXAMINE the conceptual barriers that now seem to divide Marxists and Goddess-centered pagans into mutually exclusive camps, we see they are mostly derivatives of the same campaigns of Big Lies and disinformation that perpetuate Moron Nation itself.

For example, the notorious malevolence of Abrahamic religion toward Nature, women, minorities whether ethnic or sexual, sexuality itself, any forms of governance that might genuinely empower the 99 Percent, science and ultimately dialectic materialism, has left Marxists instinctively skeptical not just of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but of all religions and even of individual expressions of spirituality. Those who know little or nothing of Goddess-centered paganism thus find it difficult to accept it is in every way imaginable the diametrical opposite of the Abrahamic cults. Unlike Abrahamic religion, which curses the entire realm of physical being and dismisses life as an ordeal engineered by a divine sadist to determine one's fitness for an unlikely paradise of prayers, hymns and the rape of virgins, Goddess-centered paganism is grounded on the implicitly revolutionary premise life is a quest for knowledge and experience that includes every possible input. It thus emphatically embraces the entire spectrum of positive human experience, sensuality and sexuality included. It views us all as siblings in the family of Nature, regards femaleness as Nature's most complete living metaphor, embraces all the tools dialectic materialism has given us for knowing Nature and ourselves, restores to sexuality the ecstasy and freedom from guilt implicit in its original manifest sacredness and looks upon the Goddess as an earthly symbol of a truly humanitarian society. The goal of building a human society based on the core principle of Communism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – is thus already implicit in the concept of Earth as Mother. And the principle of giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced by the ravages of capitalism – that is, of developing leadership cadres from those who have experienced the most acute forms of oppression firsthand – surely echos in the lyrics of “Baba Yaga”:

She said “I will be here when you're ready.
My fire will still burn when yours starts to go.”
She said “I have always been here,
I with my fearless feet in the snow”
She said “I'll be here just to watch you grow.”

Beyond “Baba Yaga” I found another Tucker song, “Rootless,” that in more ways than I can comfortably disclose seems to speak directly to me:

don't give up ride out be bold 
build the fire bright and strong
speak your truth and sing your song

Somehow, perhaps because despite my English surname my ancestry is 90-something percent Celt (and that seasoned with a trace of Mohawk), these lines remind me of what the Celtic warrior Calgacus said of an earlier plague of empire-builders: ubi sōlitūdinem faciunt pācem appellant – “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Fukushima, of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, but then I realize how Tacitus' story of the Brittani and their fight against Roman subjugation tells us our struggle against capitalism is but the newest form of the struggle against patriarchy and is therefore an old, old war indeed – an epic conflict in which our comrades include not just those of the past three centuries, but a roll-call of heroines and heroes dating at least to the Achaean sack of Knossos 3600 years ago. All at once this music of which I have been writing – Faun's and Tucker's – makes me ashamed of my despair. The lesson here is that revolution takes many forms, some not immediately discernible. But I cannot any longer doubt revolution is on its way. As Marshall McLuhan noted (though if memory serves, it was Carl Jung who said it first), art is often prophecy,  and Tucker's art, like that of Faun, is clearly preparation for a time in which capitalism no longer rules. If indeed there is some cosmic purpose for which my eyesight has been saved, surely it is helping foster that blessed future.

LB/6-13 February 2016

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